


Scars

by yfere



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Established Relationship, Geralt has a thing about talking about scars to lovers, M/M, banter galore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22989970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yfere/pseuds/yfere
Summary: "You can ask about them. Everyone does."
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 17
Kudos: 257





	Scars

Jaskier trailed a finger along one of the scars on Geralt’s chest, looking meditative. Usually it was a look Geralt liked—those moments when Jaskier wasn’t always a set of lungs, or a pair of busy hands. He could also be still, soaking in the world around him. Times like that, Geralt wanted to fill his world with good things—a long kiss, a quiet gift, a flower or bath or open window. He wanted to make sure it wasn’t always an effort, for Jaskier to transform experience into beauty— _someone’s_ idea of beauty. To ensure Jaskier didn’t, in his time spent reflecting, accidentally stumble on something cynical, or sad, or frightening, that might sour him on—hm. But Jaskier’s thinking quiet here wasn’t pleasant. His fingertip on the rough keloid bunching of Geralt’s skin prodded an ugly reflex, and a tone he’d promised himself not to use again.

_You can ask about them. Everyone does._

Jaskier snorted, the look of concentration on his face broken. “Of _course_ they do, no need to sound so put off by it,” he said. “Scars are stories, aren’t they? They’re even written down, though the penmanship is rather crude.”

“That’s one way to put it.” Geralt rolled onto his side, displacing the offending hand. Not much use in feigning sleep at this point—it was only a little early to begin the day, so he began hunting for his clothing around the room. Never could remember where Jaskier decided to hide it.

“Unless,” Jaskier engaged his fingers now in tugging his hair into place. “I suppose the trouble is it’s easy to forget there are stories about the reverse as well. ‘Jaskier, however did you get your skin as smooth and soft as that of a newborn foal?’ _This_ is the sort of question _everyone_ should be asking, and I’m very sad to say there are few so discerning. The truth of the matter, I would tell them, is that I lived a life of prosperity and peaceful study, aided in no small part by a moisturizing regimen favored by the Elves—but that was before I began an association with a Witcher whose company was as punishing to the body as enriching to the mind. Not that my injuries weren’t in their way enriching—”

“Jaskier,” Geralt interrupted. He’d learned by now that Jaskier’s chatter was more an invitation than anything else—salvation from the direct pressure to speak, as Jaskier was content to carry on alone, but also an endless dangling of thoughts to tempt Geralt into conversation. Knowing the strategy didn’t make it less effective. “Most of your scars are from before we met.”

They were faint—perhaps too faint for a human’s eyes not already alerted to their presence. Old scars from whippings, running along Jaskier’s back and ending at his mid-thigh. Geralt had seen them immediately, identified them, largely forgotten about them until that moment. They were proof, anyway, that Jaskier was lying if he wanted to say his friendship with Geralt was the first thing that ever hurt him.

Jaskier’s eyes glittered with mirth. Geralt caught his thought just as Jaskier opened his mouth. “Are you going to—”

“No.” He wasn’t going to ask. Why would he?

“Why, you think the story would bore you? As usual, you have too little faith in me. You see, my prodigious knowledge is partly a side-effect from being employed as a whipping boy in my youth, but my fortunes improved a great deal when a street urchin managed to switch places with my client and smuggle himself into court. As it turned out, the boy was something of a genius…”

Jaskier had worked himself into an act two by the time Geralt discovered his pants.

_The rafters? You’re always looking up lately so I thought— The contract is for griffons, not underclothes—_

Soon enough they’d moved on entirely from talk of scars. Geralt could only be relieved, as Jaskier babbled cheerfully at his side, that he’d gotten though without snapping, that he hadn’t poisoned the morning after all. The small, resentful creature beneath his skin settled and slept, lulled by the rock of Roach’s gait, the steady susurration of a familiar voice.

***

He might have thought that was the end of it—foolishly. He wondered often if it was something that came with living for a long while—that once a thing arrived in one’s life to bother or annoy, it would inevitably return, and return again. Or maybe it was Geralt's curse alone.

Two symptoms of this curse sat before him now. At some point and rather mysteriously, Jaskier and Yennefer had let go of their animosity towards one another—Geralt chose not to question it, as he was still uncertain whether it was good fortune or bad. At the moment, for example, Yennefer was listening with a captivating look of curiosity that brightened her eyes and parted her lips—as Jaskier lied shamelessly about how he and Geralt first met. In this version, he was rescued from four brothers intent on beating him for bedding their sister. “They had the knife out to geld me, of course, but as the brawl began our friend managed to divert it to cut into my thigh. First scar I ever had, but one I’m rather grateful for, considering—”

“Not your first scar,” Geralt said, without thinking. “And not how we met.”

“If someone missed gelding you, I imagine it would be less because of our ** _friend’s_** heroics, and more because you presented too small a target,” Yennefer said blithely. “But your bread was still in your pants when you first met, I hear.”

“Needed to find someone with a knife to butter it,” Jaskier replied, baring his teeth in a way that made Geralt wonder if he and Yennefer were friendly with each other after all. “I don’t suppose you _also_ heard about my first scars?”

Yennefer cocked her head. Geralt hummed disapprovingly, and Jaskier’s hand fluttered to his chest.

“You can tell her yourself if you think I’d _lie_.”

“I’d be lying if I repeated that fiction.” And there it was again, the sudden absorption in Jaskier’s face, and a pause that lasted for a moment too long. “…No.” He wasn’t about to be tricked into asking, either.

“Fair enough. The truth is—did you know, by Oxenfurt there are some rather untraditional kinds of pleasure houses? At the time I was in need of some extra money, to put _bread_ on the table you know—” That was about as much as Geralt caught before he left earshot, hand over his lower face to hold down whatever spasm was making his lips twitch upwards.

***

Geralt thought for a moment Jaskier might run out of momentum after the pleasure house claim. But then there was the story of getting mixed up in a rebellion against a sadistic merchant captain and Jaskier’s following stint as a pirate. About seduction into and escape from a cult of self-flaggelants. Then, of course, the the one in the letter to Ciri that hadn’t been safe to send, about a witch with purple eyes who turned him into a lion cub and sold him to an abusive circus ringmaster. They didn’t come all at once, these stories, but whenever talk turned to scars Jaskier had a new one prepared, as wild and unbelievable as the last. 

The surprising thing was Geralt didn’t find himself minding. His primary experience with Jaskier’s stories were ones about Geralt, or else Jaskier’s array of lovers…on a bad day, the Lions of Cintra. All of them awful, for one reason or the other, but somehow these were easier to listen to, made him understand a little better what made people hang on Jaskier’s word in taverns and grand halls alike. It might have been that he never paired these stories with a tune. They didn’t repeat in Geralt’s mind against his will, but because—hm. It might have been that this time, the stories were about Jaskier, though even here he seemed more interested in the _other_ characters of his tall tales. 

“Your ballads are never about yourself,” Geralt said one night, poking idly at their campfire as Jaskier wrapped up a tale of horse-thievery and acrobatics around a bull whip—one he could tell Jaskier was already adapting in his mind with Geralt as the protagonist.

“ _That’s_ what you’re going to ask about?” Geralt stayed silent, waiting the seconds required for Jaskier to sigh and answer. “A Poet who only writes about himself is both insufferable and uninspired. Besides, imagine if you were singing “Toss a Coin’—even _you_ might not escape so many people trying to punch you in the mouth.”

In the early days, Jaskier had suffered just that for the song. Geralt chose not to remind him. “You’re saying, it’s better to not tell stories about yourself.”

“Not if you’re aiming for a large audience, anyway. Better to tell it to just a trusted few—people who can adapt what you say and lend an air of objectivity.”

“Objectivity.”

“Objectification?” Jaskier looked at him from under his lashes, mouth curving upwards, and Geralt forgot about arguing.

***

It went on like that, in the cyclical way things do during a long life, pain and irritation and relief and pleasure. Endless permutations of a single lie, a single tune. Geralt had a passing thought that maybe people were like the Path, and eventually became all things if you walked beside them long enough.

“If you’re suggesting my company is anything less than constant _unabating_ pleasure, I’ll have to disagree,” Jaskier said, without glancing up from his notes. But a few years later Geralt found his words returning to him again, in a love song crooned by a youngster who studied under Jaskier at the university. _Toss a coin,_ he whispered to himself, tipping the man and slinking away before someone got a good look at his eyes. 

***

Later, he caught Jaskier scarring himself. It was a cosmetic practice, and one common in this area. Jaskier was likely curious. These were all things he remembered after he’d frightened away the artist, in the midst of cutting away small flower shapes and the poking tail of an animal on Jaskier’s back. The bard was livid, and Geralt was--

“Why would you _willingly_ —”

“It was an _experience_ , what I’m curious about was your sudden need to _interrupt_ —”

His first urge was to shout. Instead he closed his eyes, saw a field of buttercups and a wolf’s tail burning behind his lids in an afterimage. “The scars on your back were never because of me.”

“Of course they weren’t. These aren’t either—”

“I wouldn’t see them anymore. They…” had come to mean something to him, and he hadn’t realized. Hadn’t realized that having them covered up would feel—

Jaskier’s shoulders slumped, and he winced from the motion. “They mean something different to me, you know.”

They left it at that for the moment. Jaskier sweet-talked the artist into finishing the piece, putting more touches on what was to be a lion’s tail. “A memorial to one of my greatest works,” Jaskier said. “Unless you want to be a part of the process?” 

He didn’t.

But there was that thing he couldn’t avoid, like an itch beneath his skin, and it was so much easier, with Jaskier lying on his stomach with his head in his arms— unable to look directly at where Geralt sat.

“What did they mean to you?”

Not much use in feigning sleep—Geralt could hear Jaskier’s heart accelerate.

“Did you hide my doublet, by the way? I haven't seen it all night."

"No, the artist you were with stole it from you," Geralt said, and waited. That was all it ever took, after all.

Jaskier sighed. "Would it be strange if I told you I wish my first scars were after knowing you?”

“Yes.”

Jaskier laughed. “Oh, that hurts. Don’t do that. It’s just that nothing happened, really. Nothing like an adventure, nothing even worth mentioning. I misbehaved as a child, and my parents and teachers, being a literal minded lot, tried to whip me back into shape. It’s a tiresome tale, not the kind to interest anyone.”

He descended into a dark quiet then, as if lost in his thoughts. And maybe it was a kind of reflex at this point, that had Geralt rising to his feet. He walked closer, and pointed at a raised white ridge on the edge of his wrist. “I was cutting herbs, and my hand slipped.”

Jaskier laughed again, and it sounded like music. “Truly, a more riveting tale has never been spoken! I must have more details—what kind of herbs?”

“ _Arenaria_. It’s used for White Gull.” And it was strange, wasn’t it, for the talking to feel like a relief. 

***

It was only a matter of time before the idea returned in song— “the great Geralt of Rivia, unscathed by wraiths and drowners alike, mortally wounded picking flowers of white!” Jaskier snapped his fingers and seemed to apparate a white _Arenaria_ from behind a girl’s ear, to gales of laughter.

“It’s comedy, but also metaphor,” Jaskier explained later, his lips moving just barely over Geralt’s wrist. 

“Hm. Maybe you’re running out of better material.” Geralt said.

“Best give me some more then.”

“Ask me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think! <3


End file.
